Sunday, 5 February 2017

Back to Descent

Long, long time ago I painted the Descent boardgame for a friend (Here you have the Adventurers, the small creatures and two posts of the big creatures -here and here). One of the major setbacks we found is that there were a number of special characters that didn't have a mini, but just mere card tokens. Unwilling and unable to suffer such an ignominy, as expected of any gentleman, we needed a solution.

Unluckily, the only official minis for this purpose belong to an expansion that covers only certain evil characters, the Lieutenants (so not even all the minis needed, as there are also some good guys involved), and the price for those... well, let's just say that my pal was wisely reluctant to pay what it was asked for the minis.

Instead of that, he got several Reaper minis that more or less fitted in the theme. So I have a new project! They are really unexpensive (I think that the whole cost for all the minis was still under the official pack for only the evil guys) and they are the best material for conversions, hehe. The bendy plastic can be a fuss, of course, but it was little issue to me as I was going to reshape all of them.

First character will be the infamous Splig, the Goblin King. We used this orc:

Sooo, let's turn this into a Goblin

I'm not even trying to mimic the original minis, as it would be pointless. I'll give a reinterpretation based on the texts in the rulebooks and my raw materials. Regarding Splig, we only know that he is a big fat goblin who is torturing prisoners when the Adventurers arrive. A helmet is mentioned, but little else. So I had quite freedom of action.

The main issue here is that the orc looks like a warrior, not as a fat, lousy leader. But if I replaced the arms for some others not so powerful, then I could make him look fat, given that belly. So that was the solution. I used pieces from GW 'The Hobbit' not-goblins (you know, the ones I used as mutants). Specifically both arms and the head. For the helmet I used the chamber pot of the hanging scribe with the spikes from the Golin King crown. Apart from all that, I thought that a coat would reinforce the idea of being a big fish.

So I came to this

Voilà! The paintjob itself has been quite quick, I didn't want to make much more complication out of this model.